With today’s unique market conditions, Honda Financial Services (HFS) has adapted its customer communications to ensure lease customers get the new vehicles they want, when they want them. HFS has updated its mailers, which are part of a full suite of end-of-term communications, to fully inform customers of end-of-lease terms, schedules and options. These notifications also strongly encourage customers to return to their originating dealerships where they leased their current vehicles to lease or purchase their next vehicles.
Lease customers have traditionally received direct mail notices from HFS’s Lease Maturity Center at five months and three months and a letter at 45 days prior to lease termination, coupled with email reminders. In the present market, when inventory is not readily available, the mailers and emails have been updated to encourage customers to return to their dealers early to preorder their next vehicles.
According to Jon Eldridge, assistant vice president, Sales and Marketing, American Honda Finance Corporation. “We recently redesigned our end-of-term emails. We wanted to carry the same updated look and messaging to our direct mail pieces. The predominant message is to contact your originating dealer early and place your order so that a vehicle is ready for you at your end of term,” he says.
Additionally, the messaging promotes the loyalty benefits of leasing or financing with HFS, such as an excessive wear-and-use or damage waiver, a turn-in fee waiver, and a security deposit waiver.
Finally, recognizing that customers are inundated with mailings, HFS has designed the new mailers to “break through the clutter of the other emails and mail they receive,” Eldridge says. “We want something eye-catching that makes the lease-end options easy to understand.” Lease-end customers will start receiving the new mailers in November. The email updates are in effect now.
Talk to your dealer relations manager about how to complement HFS’s lease-end communications with your own. Also, be sure to use the Power of Leads report and dealer guide available on the Interactive Network.
Additional benefits of these communications for dealers and customers: